language: en

[Confidential: not for distribution. Submitted to IOP Publishing for peer review]

23 March 2010

Implications of space-momentum correlations and geometric fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions

Paul Sorensen
Brookhaven National Laboratory,
P.O. Box 5000, Upton, NY 11973
E-mail: prsorensen@bnl.gov

Abstract. The standard picture of heavy-ion collisions includes a collective expansion. If the initial energy density in the collisions is lumpy, then the expansion can convert the spatial lumpiness into correlations between final-state particles. Correlations in heavy-ion collisions show prominent features not present in p+p collisions. I argue that many features of these correlations are related to the transference of over-densities from the initial overlap region into momentum-space during the QGP phase of the expansion. I show results from a toy Monte-Carlo to illustrate the consequences of lumpy initial conditions and a collective expansion.

PACS numbers: 25.75.-q, 25.75.Ld

[Submitted to: J. Phys. G: Nucl. Phys.]

1. Introduction